Review: ‘Doctor Strange’

doctorstrange_poster“Doctor Strange” stands apart from all the other superhero movies out in the last decade because the previous success of all the different Marvel movies allowed them the comfort and room to expand their visual language and open up their stories to the realm of wild ideas made possible by the metaphysical and existential quandaries and principles brought up by your typical Saturday night college dorm room toot circle or mushroom-induced nighttime forest explorations punctuated with questions such as whether or not there are alternate dimensions beyond time which can be reached via astral projections. Sure there is a guy wearing a cape and a bad guy who wants to destroy the world and a training montage and whatnot, but there are definitely aspects of “Doctor Strange” that keep it separate and unique and interesting in this world of increasingly uniform comic book movies.

Boiled down to its essence, the story of “Doctor Strange” is rather basic. A character goes through a transformation that imbues him (or her, but let’s be real, most of these movies and stories are still about dudes) with skills and/or powers that can then be used to immediately stop a villainous person from destroying a city/country/world/universe. Along the way this new hero also becomes a better person, which almost always means becoming more selfless and helpful than at the beginning of the story.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Train To Busan’

train-to-busan-movie-poster-lgTo be honest I thought we had hit peak zombie interest around 2008 and 2009, as pop culture’s fascination with the stumbling, bumbling, and sometimes running, brain munching undead and that the genre would be dying down for awhile as everyone moved on to the next thing. And then the long running comic book series The Walking Dead got turned into the AMC series “The Walking Dead” in 2010 and now it seems like these damn zombies are gonna be around for much longer than I originally thought. What a shock. I was wrong about something.

Again.

So now in 2016, what makes a zombie movie worthwhile? What can be done with the genre? “Train to Busan” answers these questions by setting up its own rules for their undead, coming up with distinct characters with clearly defined motivations for what they do, and finding a new setting for this type of story, in this case, on a South Korean bullet train during the morning commute right at the very beginning of a cataclysmic outbreak.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Point Break’

pointbreak_poster “Point Break” is a weird movie about a straight out of the 1990’s “extreme athlete” dude bro turned FBI Agent-in-Training who uses his extreme athlete knowledge to track down and infiltrate a group of daredevil eco-terrorists. Fortunately for him these guys are also a bunch of dude bros, and they even have a pretentious faux hippie chick to round out their general awfulness as people, so he fits right in. Soon enough his allegiances are called into question and he has to decide whether or not to help his new friends or do his duty for the FBI om my god who are we kidding of course he keeps working for the FBI and tries to bring down these bad guys because they are a bunch of a mantra spouting, Earth loving, offering giving, douche bag bad guys.

The movie starts with super dope extreme athlete Johnny Utah (Luke Bracey) and one of his best bros riding dirt bikes on some perilous looking cliffs, and Johnny is all like “It’s okay, bro, follow my line” and they embrace and we’ve all seen movies before so we know right away that this bro is gonna be dead and yup there he goes off the edge of a cliff.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘War Dogs’

WarDogs_MoviePosterAn indictment of the for-profit war machine and sloppy government pandering…from the director of “Road Trip” and “Old School” and “The Hangover” trilogy? It happened, and it is called “War Dogs,” a cinematic adaptation of this 2011 Rolling Stones article detailing how two twenty-something dudes from Miami managed to get rich off of fulfilling government contracts for military weapons and supplies. One guy was sociable and worked very hard, and the other was a sociopath with the big vision and gumption to make things happen, and they enabled each other to dream bigger than ever, which as we all know in a story like this, could only lead to ruin. But what a ride on the way there.

David (Miles Teller) is fresh out of dropping out of college and he’s trying to make ends meet while living in very expensive South Beach Miami by massaging rich men for $75 an hour and trying to sell bed linen to retirement communities. When his stupidly hot girlfriend (Ana de Armas) lets him know that she is pregnant, he finds added pressure on him to find a way to make money and be a provider to the woman he loves and the baby he is stuck with because come on it’s not like they planned that shit yo. And those very one-dimensional descriptions of her character are apt because she only exists in this movie to provide motivation for David and to try to get some sympathy from the audience. She’s not a character. She’s a plot device with ridiculous eyes.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Battleship’

battleship_ver12Let’s get this out of the way, right up front: we all know “Battleship” is preposterously based on a plotless, characterless board game that involves yelling out random letters and numbers, so to expect a good movie out of this would seem to be a fool’s errand. With the whole thing reeking of “cashing in,” thanks to the ridiculous financial success of another film franchise based on a toyline, maybe it doesn’t even need to be said that “Battleship” is a dumb, spectacle-first, story-last, explosion laden, typical summer hunk of crap of the first order. But then again, who said it had to be this way?

Though Battleship: the Board Game is itself a truly iconic game, spanning generations and entertaining everyone with it’s simple yet addictive mechanics, there really is very little about the game that one would expect in a feature film. There’s the grid structure and guessing dynamic of the game, and the catch phrase “You sunk my battleship,” and that’s it. So theoretically, it would actually be pretty simple to come up with a naval based story that somehow incorporates these elements, and on paper, Peter Berg and writers Jon and Erich Hoeber’s approach of using an alien menace as the antagonists is fairly brilliant, allowing them to come up with alien technology in their story that would necessitate the use of the board game’s well known game play and also giving them plenty of room to come up with their own characters and story arcs; with such a blank slate to work with, these guys really could have told any story they wanted to, all dressed up in the guise of blockbuster entertainment.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Transformers: Dark of the Moon’

transformersdarkofthemoon_poster“Transformers: Dark of the Moon” is the third of four (and soon to be five) mega opuses from Michael Bay about two races of sentient machine-based alien life forms who can change into cars and trucks and who play out their epic civil war on Earth because the war has already destroyed their own home Cybertron (which makes these some inconsiderate aliens, if you ask me). These cars and trucks engage in massive battles that destroy countless buildings and take the lives of so many people that they don’t even bother mentioning it in any way, shape or form, that’s how important those thousands and thousands of unseen dead are in this movie, and the whole time there are these pip-squeak humans literally running around the feet of these giant robots and pretending to do stuff that matters when all they can really do is keep from getting stomped out.

Okay, that’s actually the basic plot of everything Transformers-related, so what would make things any different this time around? Compared to the other films, “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” is actually the best scripted, in that it uses less absurd macguffins like the eyeglasses with the map on them or the “allspark” in the first film, or the search for the “matrix of leadership” in the second film (along with the return of the aforementioned “allspark” thingy). This third movie sees the return of this matrix of leadership contrivance, but they find a better way to use it in terms of getting the plot rolling along, and otherwise they drop all the crap and keep it relatively simple (relatively).Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Alex Cross’

alex_cross_ver5_xlg“Alex Cross” is a boring, fairly hackneyed attempt at a crime procedural thriller, ably acted by Tyler Perry and Matthew Fox but weakly directed by Rob Cohen, who seems far too concerned with what’s cool as opposed to what’s smart and right for the story, and failing at both aspects anyway. What could essentially be an episode of any random network television crime procedural television show, “Alex Cross” really offers nothing new to the genre and doesn’t do anything fun or interesting with the old clichés, which results in a boring 101 minutes.

Detective Dr. Alex Cross (Tyler Perry) heads up a small team that apparently focuses on women killers, as the movie starts with them tracking down a kidnapper and saving a young girl, both of whom are unrelated to the rest of the story. Cross is pretty great at what he does, displaying a Sherlock Holmes level of crime scene deduction and reasoning that is always right and never is questioned, but he does come across a dangerous foe in the form of a random hired killer (Matthew Fox), who is hired to kill three people, and goes after them one at a time. Fox plays this role with a level of obvious insanity, all wide eyes and shaved head, and he definitely seemed to have fun playing this sadistic and crazy character, and he pretty much acts as the one watchable and somewhat interesting thing in this whole film. So Fox and his team try to catch this guy and the whole movie is a game of cat and mouse, with the killer taking out people close to Detective Dr. Cross, making it personal and forcing Cross to go out on a righteous search for retribution.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Suicide Squad’

SuicideSquad_MoviePosterIn “Suicide Squad,” a ragtag group of suicide squaders doing some suicide squadding and battle some sort of vague magic, while something close to thirty different songs get briefly played to convey some sort of feeling of I guess “fun.” Also Jared Leto is a tattooed Joker and Ben Affleck’s Batman shows up for two short scenes, one quick “dream sequence,” and a boring mid-credits after-movie scene in which no new information is conveyed beyond what fans of these films already know.

What could have been either a wild romp of a comic book movie or a brilliant anti-hero subversion of what we’ve already seen dozens of times instead turned into a movie that tried to be both at the same time, and that really just doesn’t work. You can’t have one character openly pine for his young daughter while another mugs for the camera right next to him. It’s one or the other. Serious or light. “The Dark Knight” or “Guardians of the Galaxy.” That middle ground is brutal.

Also, just to get this out of the way right now, can we please be done with the tired “energy beam shooting into the sky from a building in the middle of a city” trope? The one the heroes always have to shut down to save the city or world or universe? You know, the one used in “Marvel’s The Avengers” and again in “R.I.P.D.?” Also used in the most recent “Fantastic Four” and “The Amazing Spider-Man” and “Ghostbusters” and there are also variations of this trope used in “Man of Steel” and “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” just to name a few examples. There’s always a big colorful swirling vortex over the city either sucking things in or spitting things out, and terrible things are happening, and then it gets stopped by the good guys and the vortex goes away like it was never even there. We’ve seen it a lot, and if you see “Suicide Squad,” then you are going to see it again.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Abduction’

Abduction_PosterA young aspiring action star turns to a director of usually solid b-movies to help launch his karate-based, abs-and-chest-at-the-forefront career as this generation’s Jean Claude Van Damme. The result is a lousy mess of a movie with bland action, bad acting and a boring story, with the aspiring actor’s future looking a little grim.

This actor, of course, is Twilight’s Taylor Lautner, and the silver screen has not seen such an inept dramatic performer is quite a long while. He has all the charisma of a deadly black hole, reads his lines with the inflection of a robot, and makes the aforementioned Van Damme look like Daniel Day-Lewis. Meanwhile, director John Singleton burst onto the Hollywood scene with the excellent Boyz n the Hood, and while he hasn’t made anything as good as his first film, he still has a resume loaded with entertaining and well done movies. So what went wrong? What happened in his recent six-year hiatus that made him go from the perfectly fine and entertaining “Four Brothers” to this abysmal piece of malarkey?Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Cowboys & Aliens’

cowboys-and-aliens-international-movie-posterJust look at that title – “Cowboys & Aliens.” Going into this movie, everyone knew it would be a tough one to pull off. The mixing of the very grounded and dusty Western genre with the fantastic, more imaginative aspects of science fiction writing doesn’t make for a smooth pairing. Some massaging and elbow grease has to be used to make these two genres come together in an entertaining and coherent fashion. And while “Cowboys & Aliens” does come close to nailing this concept, it does fall short, and probably would have been much better without the aliens at all.

The set up is simple. The movie opens in the middle of the desert, in which a gunslinger with amnesia (Daniel Craig) wakes up injured and wanders into the nearest town. When he gets there, he finds out that he’s a stagecoach robber and murderer and the law takes him in. But before he can be processed, here comes an alien invasion, blowing up the town and lassoing away people from the streets and into their little aircrafts. So our amnesiac stagecoach robbing gunfighter hero teams up with the local dickhead cattle baron Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford) to form a posse and track down the aliens in an effort to save the people that were kidnapped. Oh, and Daniel Craig has some sort of ridiculous alien wrist gun the whole time.Continue Reading …